28 search hits

Cloud computing promises several advantages over classic IT models and has undoubtedly been one of the most hyped topics in the industry over the last couple of years.
Besides the established delivery models Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), especially Platform as a Service (PaaS) has attracted significant attention these days.
PaaS facilitates the hosting of scalable applications in the cloud by providing managed and highly automated application environments.
Although most offerings are conceptually comparable to each other, the interfaces for application deployment and management vary greatly between vendors.
Despite providing similar functionalities, technically different workflows and commands provoke vendor lock-in and hinder portability as well as interoperability.
In this study, we present the tool Nucleus, which realizes a unified interface for application deployment and management among cloud platforms.
With its help, we aim to increase the portability of PaaS applications and thus help to avoid critical vendor lock-in effects.

In 2007, OASIS finalized their Business Process Execution Language 2.0 (BPEL) specification which defines an XML-based language for orchestrations of Web Services. As the validation of BPEL processes against the official BPEL XML schema leaves room for a plethora of static errors, the specification contains 94 static analysis rules to cover all static errors. According to the specification, any violations of these rules are to be checked by a standard conformant engine at deployment time. When a violation is not detected in BPEL processes during deployment, such errors are only detectable at runtime, making them expensive to find and fix.
Due to the large amount of rules, we have created a tag system to categorize them, allowing easier reasoning about these rules.
Next, we formalized the static rules and derived test cases based on these formalizations with the aim to evaluate the degree of support for static analysis of BPEL engines.
Hence, this work is the foundation of the static analysis capabilities of BPEL engines.

Interface theories allow systems designers to reason about the composability and compatibility of concurrent system components. Such theories often extend both de Alfaro and Henzinger’s Interface Automata and Larsen’s Modal Transition Systems, which leads, however, to several issues that are undesirable in practice: an unintuitive treatment of specified unwanted behaviour, a binary compatibility concept that does not scale to multi-component assemblies, and compatibility guarantees that are insufficient for software product lines.
In this paper we show that communication mismatches are central to all these problems and, thus, the ability to represent such errors semantically is an important feature of an interface theory. Accordingly, we present the error-aware interface theory EMIA, where the above shortcomings are remedied by introducing explicit fatal error states. In addition, we prove via a Galois insertion that EMIA is a conservative generalisation of the established MIA (Modal Interface Automata) theory.

In this report, we introduce an abstract interval domain I(D; P) and associated fixed point semantics for reasoning about concurrent and sequential variable accesses within a synchronous cycle-based model of computation. The interval domain captures must (lower bound) and cannot (upper bound) information to approximate the synchronisation status of variables consisting of a value status D and an init status P. We use this domain for a new behavioural definition of Berry’s causality analysis for Esterel. This gives a compact and uniform understanding of Esterel-style constructiveness for shared-memory multi-threaded programs. Using this new domain-theoretic characterisation we show that Berry’s constructive semantics is a conservative approximation of the recently proposed sequentially constructive (SC) model of computation. We prove that every Berry-constructive program is sequentially constructive, i.e., deterministic and deadlock-free under sequentially admissible scheduling. This gives, for the first time, a natural interpretation of Berry-constructiveness for main-stream imperative programming in terms of scheduling, where previous results were cast in terms of synchronous circuits. It also opens the door to a direct mapping of Esterel’s signal mechanism into boolean variables that can be set and reset arbitrarily within a tick.
We illustrate the practical usefulness of this mapping by discussing how signal reincarnation is handled efficiently by this transformation, which is of complexity that is linear in program

Despite the popularity of BPEL engines to orchestrate complex and executable processes, there are still only few approaches available to help find the most appropriate engine for individual requirements.
One of the more crucial factors for such a middleware product in industry are the performance characteristics of a BPEL engine.
There exist multiple studies in industry and academia testing the performance of BPEL engines, which differ in focus and method.
We aim to compare the methods used in these approaches and provide guidance for further research in this area.
Based on the related work in the field of performance testing, we created a process engine specific comparison framework, which we used to evaluate and classify nine different approaches that were found using the method of a systematical literature survey.
With the results of the status quo analysis in mind, we derived directions for further research in this area.

Correct and standard compliant serializations of BPMN process models are crucial for model exchange between tools, automatic application of academic verification approaches and executability on BPMN engines. The official standard document does not provide an extensive set of all constraints regarding the correctness of model serializations. This technical reports fills this gap by presenting a categorized list of generic, technology independent constraints stated by the standard. Furthermore it is analyzed which rules are already covered when the standardized XSD-based serialization format is used.

More than five years have passed since the final release of the long-desired OASIS standard of a process language for web service orchestration, the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The aim of this standard is to establish a universally accepted orchestration language that forms a core part of current service-oriented architectures and, because of standardisation, avoids vendor lock-in. High expectations, in academia and practice alike, have been set on it. By now, several fully conformant and highly scalable engines should have arrived in the market. The perception of many however, is that standard conformance in current engines is far from given. It is our aim to shed light on this situation. In this study, we present the tool betsy, a BPEL Engine Test System that allows for a fully-automatic assessment of the standard conformance of a given BPEL engine. We use it to examine the five most important open source BPEL engines available today. Betsy comes with a large set of engineindependent conformance test cases for assessing BPEL standard conformance. This enables us to give a view of the state of the art in BPEL support.

In the post-proceedings of the Workshop "Visibility in Information Spaces and in Geographic Environments" a selection of research papers is presented where the topic of visibility is addressed in different contexts. Visibility governs information selection in geographic environments as well as in information spaces and in cognition. The users of social media navigate in information spaces and at the same time, as embodied agents, they move in geographic environments. Both activities follow a similar type of information economy in which decisions by individuals or groups require a highly selective filtering to avoid information overload. In this context, visibility refers to the fact that in social processes some actors, topics or places are more salient than others. Formal notions of visibility include the centrality measures from social network analysis or the plethora of web page ranking methods. Recently, comparable approaches have been proposed to analyse activities in geographic environments: Place Rank, for instance, describes the social visibility of urban places based on the temporal sequence of tourist visit patterns. The workshop aimed to bring together researchers from AI, Geographic Information Science, Cognitive Science, and other disciplines who are interested in understanding how the different forms of visibility in information spaces and geographic environments relate to one another and how the results from basic research can be used to improve spatial search engines, geo-recommender systems or location-based social networks.

Orchestration languages are of paramount importance for building composite services in service-oriented architectures. Pattern-based analysis is a method that allows to determine the expressiveness of existing process languages and serves as a means of comparison between different languages. The aim of this study is the analysis and comparison of important languages for building Web Services-based orchestrations, as well as the improvement of the method of pattern-based analysis. The predominant orchestration language today is the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) 2.0. This language is a standard that has been implemented by several companies and projects, such as the OpenESB BPEL Service Engine. An additional language is Windows Workflow 4 that is shipped by Microsoft as part of the .NET framework. There are various aspects, represented by pattern catalogs, for which existing languages can be analyzed. This study suggests a methodology for ordering existing pattern catalogs according to their importance for a selected problem domain which is Business-to-Business Integration. It furthermore presents an extensive evaluation of the languages at hand and assesses the degree of support they provide for several of the most important pattern catalogs. These catalogs are the workflow control-flow patterns, the service interaction patterns, the change patterns and the time patterns.